Large normally hyperbolic cylinders in a priori stable Hamiltonian systems (Q625732)

The author of this very interesting paper studies a Hamiltonian system on \(\mathbb T^n\times\mathbb R^n\) of the form \[ H(q,p)=h(p)-\varepsilon^2G(t,q,p), \quad \mathbb T\times\mathbb T^n\times\mathbb R^n, \tag \(H\) \] where \(\varepsilon \) is a small perturbation parameter. In the unperturbed system \((\varepsilon =0)\) the momentum variable \(p\) is constant. The dynamics of the perturbed system in the neighborhood of a torus \(\{p=p_0\}\) corresponding to a resonant frequency is studied. The frequency is of the form \(\partial h(p_0)=(\omega ,0)\in\mathbb R^m\times\mathbb R^r\). If the restricted frequency \(\omega \) is non-resonant in \(\mathbb R^m\), then it is expected that the averaged system \[ H_a(q,p)= H_a(q_1,q_2,p_1,p_2)= h(p)-\varepsilon^2V(q_2) \tag \(H_a\) \] should locally approximate the dynamics of the system \((H)\) near \(p=p_0=(p_1^0,p_2^0)\), where \(q=(q_1,q_2)\in\mathbb T^m\times\mathbb T^r\) and \(p=(p_1,p_2)\in\mathbb R^m\times\mathbb R^r\), and where \[ V(q_2)= \int{G(t,q_1,q_2,p_0)}\,dt\,dq_1. \] It is assumed that the function \(h(p)\) is convex with positive definite Hessian, and the averaged potential \(V\) has a non-degenerate local maximum at \(q_2=0\). The main result obtained here is that there exist normally hyperbolic cylinders in a priori stable Hamiltonian systems the size of which is bounded from below independently of the size of the perturbation. It turns out that the obtained results have applications to the study of Arnold's diffusion.